Mrs. Roundell's Practical cookery book

Parsley must never be used wet. If it is, the leaves will all stick together, and the flavour will be lost. Parsley has a strong taste, and a dark juice, and must be carefully prepared. Many dishes are spoilt by the addition of ill-cooked parsley. Parsley should be first blanched in really boiling water, and then carefully dried by wringing it in a cloth. When the parsley is quite dry, the leaves must be picked from the stalks (the stalks are not used) and cut across closely. For sauces they should then be minced as finely as possible ; parsley cannot be minced too finely. The minced leaves must be gathered into the corner of a cloth, and rubbed and rinsed in water, till the water becomes green. The parsley must again be carefully dried before using. It should look like tiny bright green specks. The beautiful smooth skin of Tomatoes is apt to disagree with people, and it is therefore generally advisable to remove it. This is easily done by putting the Tomatoes in a wire basket and plunging them for a few seconds in boiling water. Then put them at once into quite cold water, and they will peel easily. Of course this is not necessai’y when the Tomatoes are rubbed through a sieve. Mushrooms out of the fields have a far more delicate flavour than those grown in mushroom- houses and cellai’s. Mushrooms 300 RULES FOR COOKING VEGETABLES ought never to be washed. They should be wiped, and a tap on the top of each will knock the grit out of the gills. The skin can be easily peeled off. Mushrooms are best when cooked as simply as possible, and as they contain a great deal of moisture no water should be used in cooking them. Their flavour is best preserved by cooking them in their own juice. Mushrooms should be quite fresh and firm, with pink gills. Some cooks endeavour to keep them white by steeping them in lemon-juice, but although the colour may be preserved by this method the flavour is lost. It is very important that vegetables should be eaten when young. Country-house gardeners are apt to sacrifice quality to quantity and flavour to size. They are inclined, too, to overlook the commoner vegetables, so that Radishes resemble ram’s horns in size and texture, Turnips are like blocks of wood, and Lettuces run to seed. Thus the Vegetables are wasted, and the ground in which they grow is wasted too. To those who have not gardens, I would say, Do not be deluded by size into buying old vegetables. It is sheer waste of money to buy them, and it is waste of time and fuel to cook them. Y egetables are becoming a more and more important part of English cookery, and English Vegetables are the finest in the world. V egetables were indeed extensively used in England up to the middle of the eighteenth century, but after that time little attention seems to have been paid to them or to the method of cooking them. Monsieur Louis Simond, who visited England in 1810, ridicules the enormous number of dishes of meat served with every course of a dinner, and adds “Vegetables are “ exhibited in all the simplicity of nature, like hay to horses, “only a little boiled instead of dried.” In the cookery books published even as late as 1861, vegetables are hardly mentioned at all. The cook never troubled herself about them, and they were left to the tender mercies of the kitchenmaid, or even to the scullerymaid.